Rise and see.

“Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary.”  Is.40:31

The root meaning of the Hebrew word translated as ‘wait’, means “to bind together, perhaps by twisting” (Strong’s definition H6960). Our common understanding of the word wait, (especially when it comes to God) is that we are required to spend a lot of our lives ‘waiting’ for God to get around to answering our prayers. This makes sense from a natural earthly perspective, for to our earthly eyes there appears to be so much wrong with this world that urgently needs God to intervene to put right. But what if there was another way to see this world?

What if it were possible to rise up from a mere earthly perspective and begin to see our lives and our world from God’s perspective? How different is His view from ours? According to His Word, God’s thoughts on us and our world are as far apart from an earthly perspective as it is possible to get (Is.55:9). Stop and think for a moment, about all the things you have been crying out to God and praying about for years, all the things you have been ‘waiting’ on God for. What would be the most radically different way of looking at those ‘problems’ that is possible?

What if I told you that God sees as accomplished, what you are ‘waiting’ for? (Jn.19:28-30). What if that is precisely what He means, when He says that His ways are as far apart from ours as it is possible to get! What if God’s idea of ‘waiting’, is Him waiting for us, to see what He sees? What if the way He enables us to see, is to rise our vision up into the heavenly realm, much as an eagle soars higher than any earthbound creature? What if the way He does that, is to impart to us His mind (1Cor.2:16), so that we begin to think His thoughts and what if those thoughts are not thoughts of being separated from us by time or space, but thoughts that come from one who sees Himself as having been bound up together with us and the end and the beginning also bound as one? (Is.46:10, Rev.22:13, John 17:22,23).

What if I told you that all that already happened through Christ; that He who is the Alpha and the Omega, He who holds all things together, has bound Himself up with man and shared with us all that He is and has? (Luke 15:12, John 17:22, Rom.8:32, Col.3:3,4). What if His intention was never that we wait for Him, but that we wait with Him and so His Spirit is renewing our minds to His way of thinking, convincing us more and more that we are one with Him, by weaving our thoughts together with His, line by line, much like an act of embroidery? What if on rising from such a place of ‘waiting’, believers began to so see themselves as one with Him, that they found themselves no longer ‘waiting’ for God to do something, but rather becoming themselves the very answer to the prayers of the earthbound (Matt.9:38, Matt.10:7,8). What if the view from heaven, the view of the eagle, is that God has already answered the prayers of every earthbound soul by giving Christ and it is He who now waits for His body to rise up to see as He sees, that they may be as He is, in this world (1Cor.6:17,1Jn.4:17). What if such a vision was always God’s way for us to run without growing tired and to walk without growing weary?

Your soul longs for such rest. It rises on wings at this news. So eat and drink this gospel again, or your life’s journey will weary you (1Kings 19:5-8). Rise and see!